The pictures I took in San Francisco/GDC are finally online: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2005-03-GDC_San_Francisco/ — While working on them, I was overall disappointed both to the technical quality and also to the quality of them as photography. Travel photos are probably generally one of the lowest species among their kind, but still there should be some reason behind every picture one takes, and that idea should be communicated through the image. A mass of blurry, unrecognizable shots has no value whatsoever.
Partially as a reaction to this, I revisited the reasons behind my interest into photography. I bought my first “systems camera” in 1980, if my memory serves me. There is one bookshelf filled with photos, mostly in collage-like album books from those active years (1980-1997). After that, other interests have taken precedence. A good photograph, like any other activity if well done, takes time. I remember spending hours after hours training my drawing skills, then those of photography, then spending most of time writing; and the quality of output has indeed some kind of correlation with that investment. It really is simple like that.
It is Good Friday today, and enjoying the day off, we drove into south, then walking a bit around Nokia. I took a quick series of black-and-white photos around Nokia’s church and Hinttala museum: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2005-03-b_white/ (shot number nine is Laura’s, btw.)
Canon IXUS v3 that I used does not have much of a zoom, and its possibilities for manually configuring the image settings are rather limited. But, as you can see even from these scaled-down images, a 3-megabyte CCD and DIGIC processor does rather nice work on conveying the textures and shades when you have proper daylight and can use the ISO 100 setting.
Currently, I am considering of upgrading either into Canon EOS 300D or 350D, since my old EF lenses would work with those bodies. The reviews I have read seem promising, too:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos300d/
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/canoneos350d/
Any comments or user experiences of those, or competitive models are most welcome.
frans goes blog 